


Mutant Seadweller Almost-Feral Vantasies

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Every Crook and Granny - Unrelated Seadweller Reproduction & Junk [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Beforus, Cronus's Hatred of the Glub-be-Damned Sea and All that Pees in It, Rites of Passage, Troll Gills, Troll OCs, gillkat, grubKat, inconvenient pale crush, meeting of two worlds, seadwellerKankri, seadwellerKarkat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 08:30:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4472426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cronus has functional gills and a hatred of seawater.<br/>Beforus assigns him to science at sea.<br/><br/>Kankri just wants to feed his younger pod member until Karkat is properly fat and ready to meet the rest of their pod. These air-breathing trolls are really quite trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mutant Seadweller Almost-Feral Vantasies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaku_no_gaara_ai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaku_no_gaara_ai/gifts).



> Dear Gaara: you said "I take anything where either Signless or Karkat is one of the participants" and I think "dogs playing poker". You said "mutant seadweller almost-feral vantases" and I went tappity tap thinking "oh, it's a bit long for a comment, but it should fit" forgetting that the comment window is counted in *characters* and not words. Oops.
> 
> Feel free to continue to prompt - it appears that I am still quite susceptible to Vantasy.

*

Not for the first time Cronus wishes that he wasn’t hatched a "seadweller". It’s not that any of the rumors regarding non-functional gills or burst eardrums or a fear of the dark are true. It’s just that he really, _really_ hates seawater.

He hates immersing himself slowly, feeling the brine climb up his body with the waves and his slow advance forward. He hates immersing himself quickly over the side of a boat, crash, the gross _gulug_ of expelled lung air and _thup-pop_ squiggle of gills opening. He hates how all his motions are slower and even his horns feel compressed. He hates how even when he climbs out, the water drags at him.

He hates the _hiss-thip_ of resealing opercula and draining gills, and the cough of lungs transitioning to air, even as he presses forward, eager for the as-yet-still distant moment when he will be dry, in dry clothes, and _not smell of brine_. He hates knowing that everything, _evwery glub-be-damned thing_ in the ocean has peed and shit in it, and he hates that just because he _can_ breathe it, he’s expected to. The first thing he does, as soon as he can, is take a shower. Even if he doesn’t so much enjoy freshwater as he just doesn’t want to smell brine.

Of _course_ he’s assigned sea duties. _Of fricking course_.

And of course, he hates the damn fauna, from the stupid tiny helpless skyhorses that guiltily remind him of his lusus, to the massive toothy fishes that want to eat him, and possibly his boat, his ancestor, and the last damn he has to give. He’s thought, more than once, of letting them, but it’s the idle _what-if?_ thought anyone has at the top of tall places, or at the Fauna Curation Collection, near the venomous noodlelizards, where everyone taps on the glass.

He goes home near dawn every night that the ship’s docked, and he showers and can’t sleep, so he gets out his guitar and tries to compose something, or just play chords, and of _course_ , all he can think of are the stupid murder and betrayal ballads his shipmates sing. Of course.

Cronus Ampora hates every damn thing about the ocean, its inhabitants, his shipmates, his ship, and every last bureaucratic tyrant that so much as sneezed in the vicinity of his vocational assignment, up until the night that he’s cataloging juvenile slimefish populations in coral and senses something incoming so fast that all he has time to do is roll before something, _someone_ , hits him so hard all he sees for a moment are stars and _red_ and desperate anger _._ Red stars, _Luccie in the Sky with Diamonds_.

He falls in love with all the graceless inevitability of that first step overboard into the ocean.

*

Karkat Vantas can swim. He can! He can swim just fine. Or at least better than he could last week, and that’s at least something. He flips his little tail and squirts backward and up, bump, into the squishy seastars with which Kankri’s lined their narrow hideaway. _Okay_ , he thinks, as he drifts back down, _almost there_. _One more time_. Just like the last few dozen times.

He’s a good grub, a smart grub, and he doesn’t try to leave the relative safety of their tiny hive.

*

_Intruders!_

You feel the anchor crash into the water and then the bodies. This isn’t the first time that trolls have entered your territory. Last time was before Karkat hatched though, long before, back when you were still with your pod and this reef was an occasional stop and not a hive for you and your first charge. _Those_ trolls had mostly just fished the massing silvrenfish during their mating season, and once it was over, both trolls and surviving amorous fish had moved along. _These_ trolls come with flat objects and sticks in hand, study everything, poke themselves into every crevice. You flatten yourself against the sand and tense your papillae to a less troll-like texture. _You’re a stone. Just a stone._ Karkat is safe between the den of two eels that are smart enough keep predators out and smarter to fear you over a wandering tenticklepode.

Karkat is your first egg, given to you to prove your adulthood in his care and protection. You know that the tradition is more than just a way to spread the risk for the pod’s young, a way for the juveniles to formally prove their adulthood, but despite the ample examples of the strong bond between caretaker and charge, you had not expected to feel that bond so _strongly_ , or so _soon_. You love Signless, are closer to him than your own forebears, but it is a relationship in which you are always the student. It felt good to feel safe, but it feels good now to be the protector and provider. You would die for Karkat, but you’d _much_ rather destroy anything to threaten him and watch him grow to do the same. 

You propel yourself closer to a nearby female slowly, changing color as you go, now a bit more sand over your back, now an anemone or seastar added to your disguise. You follow and watch her watching slimefish, tapping the stick into the flat object, once for each hidden fish revealed. Minutes pass and you wonder what they’re doing. They don’t act hungry. They’re not communicating with one another. Just tap tap, move along. The others don’t react to the taps. All but one of them have fins and gills like you, but you haven’t caught so much as one of them displaying so much as a flash of frustration or interest across their skin. You concentrate so hard on the female you’re observing, determined not to miss the most minuscule of skin changes, that you allow yourself to lose track of the others.

You feel one of them moving behind you, and you don’t care if they find you now because somehow, incredibly, he’s right above your den. He's heading for the crevice and neither eel is doing _anything_. You launch yourself and hit your fastest speed by the time you impact.

*

Ampora makes no bones about his hatred of everything briny. You can’t decide if it’s a kindness or a punishment that half an hour after reporting the incident, someone far above your level of Sciencification Ship Captain, assigns him to “civilize” the two feral mutant seadwellers. On land. They mean cull. But they can’t very well _say_ it, not yet, not without an official assessment, even if neither grub nor adult will vocalize beyond growls and moans above water and both have taken chunks out of the trolls that participated in their capture. You were smart enough to put on gloves before wrangling the grub into a locked tank usually used for specimens.

The adult, surprisingly small for such a menace, is tied hand and foot on the floor of the crew quarters. He pants in the air as if breathing pains him. You ignore him. No one’s yet died of breathing air and he gets restive whenever someone meets his eyes. Even wigglers learn that not everything is a dominance display. It’s a shame though. Feral trolls are relatively rare and a feral troll raising a related troll could be of great scientific value with the right sciencerrorists assigned. So far as you know, Ampora only studies anything so far as is necessary to bitch about it.

The grub, red as the adult’s eyes, and biding fair to grow into a miniature of him, complete with tiny bud horns, angry expression, and bizarre brilliant red mutation, is locked in the tank of seawater with a stone for beaching should he wish to breathe air. He’s doing his level best to pry out the tank adhesive and escape. _Pick. Pick. Pick._ You’re going to go mad if you have to listen to him through the whole ride back, even with the sound of the engines to cover the noise. You pick up the tank. The grub sloshes and screams at you. You ignore him and take the stairs a conservative one at a time to the crew quarters. He’s Ampora’s responsibility from now on, the kid can start grubsitting tonight.

*

You ache all over, one eye swelled shut and your hide scraped over a practical hillside of sharp coral. Fish are probably still eating your skin scraps. You’ve been excused to clean up and rest so you wash out your assortment of scrapes, gouges, and bites and retire to your bunk, even though the company consists of the primary source of your ills. Flop. Onto your bunk you go, belly first. Your back itches abominably. Your right earfin is on fire, maybe it will fall off and you can be excused from this saltwater madness. When you close your good left eye you can pretend that your other isn't swelled shut and hot to the touch.

 _Drag. Clunk. Drag. Clunk_.

Your shipmates wrapped your prisoner/rescued feral with tape, then rope, over his wrists and ankles, attaching the bonds to one another behind his back. They then tied him to the spare anchor, which only weighs about what he does. Personally, you don’t get why they had to fish him out in the first place. You could have forgiven them for not exacting revenge on behalf of your mauled hide, you really didn't expect them to, not when no one here much likes you any more than you like these sea-mad freaks, but you’re positive they only did it because they can’t resist _poking_ things. Sciencerrorists. Why can’t they ever keep their grabby hands to themselves?

You crane your neck, _evwerything hurts, **wwhy**_ , and you meet the gaze of you assailant. Your eyes lock and he frowns but stills, every pane and vane of him still, if no smaller, refusing to show the slightest submission to you. He’s half your size and still fighting, even when clearly exhausted from being wrestled by half the crew into his bonds. Your feel your own fins lift and flick into a textbook Western Beforan Fin Language enactment of _Deescalate the Situation:_ _Let’s all just settle down now shall we?_

Most of the crew are seatrolls even if only one of you sleeps briney. You can’t help but get _some_ practice. And, well, plenty of trolls accidentally _say_ more than they mean to, so it’s not that strange that your embarrassing pale feelings for a stranger are slipping out finwise when you’re high on pain endorphins and his earfins are spread as if he’s straining to understand you.

_Whinnnne (drop), hum, moan (lift)?_

You have no idea what he means by that, or even if it _is_ communication, though it _seems_ to be, but his fins flick back and forth in a very clear _Returned Aggression Only: You started it._ He bares his teeth in a humorless threat smile.

“You may be talking, but I have no idea what you said.”

His fins lower and he looks less than angry for a moment, though he still doesn’t look like he has any idea what _you_ said. You flop back down and hear him shuffle closer. You should probably keep an eye on him (your _one_ eye on him) but you figure that he won’t be able to more than belly crawl and you’ll have plenty of warning if he tries to attack you. You’re more tired than you thought, and you close your eyes and almost fall asleep still counting stupid juvenile slimefish.

Brain primed to hunt for the slimy buggers, now you can’t _stop_ seeing them, like afterimages seared under your eyelids. A knock under the bed jars you back to awareness.

 _“Go awway_.” You won’t admit that you moaned it, but there’s no other crew to witness your admission of exhaustion, which would rightly earn you merciless mocking. You put an arm over your eyes. It’s not fair that you’re stupid in pale love with a feral mutant midget. Why can’t you just pretend this never happened?

 _Knock. **Knock**. **Knock**_. Now you know it’s deliberate. The bed shakes with each of his assaults. He’s clearly obnoxious. How can you have fixated on him? Why don’t emotions respond to logic? He’s like the missing link between trolls and lusii, what kind of sicko are you? Okay, you try not to answer that, all too aware of your browsing history.

 ** _Thud_**.

The bed shakes again and you edge over despite the protests of skin and muscles and disgusting amounts of self-pity and you edge your head over the side of the bed. Red eyes glare at you and then disappear. _Thunk_. The bunk shakes. In order to thrash his legs sufficiently he has to contort practically in half backwards. You’re surprised he has enough clearance under the bed to do it.

“If I start the ends of the knots you can undo the rest and be back over the side before we all regret this, right?” No answer.

You dangle a hand over the edge of the bed and wiggle your fingers. He bites you. You probably should have thought of that. You’re going to attribute that to being palestuck stupid and get this over with and behind you as soon as possible.

You pull your arm back with difficulty as he wedges himself in place to counteract the drag. You’re just about in that place where while you ache all over, a fresh wound is more like a cup of coffee with loads of sugar than something you’ll soon regret. And you _will_ regret it, you’re not that out of it to think otherwise.

Teeth engaged, he can’t move in time when you get him far enough out to lock your free hand over the back of his neck, under his hair, thick and starting to bush out as it dries. You tighten your grip and he tightens his, sharp teeth grinding unmercifully into your wrist. Sparks and stars dance at the edges of you eye, over the back of your closed eyelid. You loosen your grip and he loosens his. Your wrist is throbbing now. You have no idea what you’re saying but you just keep talking, a low steady stream of nonsense. There might be a grocery list in there, not that you’re ever on land long enough. You let your thumb on his neck slide up and back a few times, gently, try to show him that you’re really not trying to threaten him. It’s weird to do this to a stranger, and weirder still with your crush on him, but most Beforans aren’t exactly bite-at-first-meeting types. When you let go of him, he lets go of you.

You want to pull your newly assaulted wrist to safety, but he’s still got his face against it and you don’t want to make him think that he’s losing his only leverage. You can feel his breathing as rapid exhales that brush across the bite with not-quite-pain. 

You lean further over, reaching your free arm down his back, careful to keep your own face turned to the side and clear of his neck as you get closer. If he twists over and up to go after your face or neck with his teeth, you still have your bleeding arm to stop him. As you start to pick at the knots one handed, you can feel his wrists and fingers move, try to meet yours, he’s trying to help. You get one twist free, and he can feel the tail end of the rope even if it hasn’t gotten him any measure of freedom.

He slides out, letting your arms free entirely and sits with his back to you, twisted to look over his shoulder at you, still wary, but willing to help you help him. The light down here is dim, so if it seems like there are cloud shadows racing over his compelling face, the skin of his strong back, the lines of his wiry arms, it’s just the flicker of the glowworms, which ought to have been replaced last trip. His skin feels warmer than yours, at least the spots of you that aren’t currently incubating hideous coral infections, and you wonder for the first time exactly _how_ he’s mutated.

You try not to look down at his muscular naked butt, but it’s just _there_ , right _there_ , just below his tied hands. The bottoms of his upturned feet are wide, his toes long for his size, with webbing between. His toenails, from what little you can see from this angle, are neat and you wonder idly how he manages without the benefit of clippers or pumice or convenience stores. He smells just slightly musky under the odor of still drying seawater. His hair is curling as it dries and if you want to curl your own fingers through it, you’re not so far lost as to do more than put it aside to maybe obsess over it later when he’s safely gone and you have nothing better to do.

You get his hands free quickly after that, slice through the tape with your claws, and he starts on his ankles. Footsteps on the stairs prompt him to slide back under the bed. He takes the discarded wrist ties with him, a sign of at least some intelligence greater than instinct. You wrap your blanket over your bleeding wrist and pull your palmtop out.

*

The first sign of your troubles may yet be an unexpected ally. He mutters nonsense continually, but he also helps untwist the fiber with which his pod entrapped you. Another comes and you slide back under the dry shelf with the evidence of your progress. You can hear Karkat before the new pod member arrives and you seethe but you’re not yet free to do more. He sounds angry, but not hurt. You fumble at your leg restraints frantically but quietly, counsel yourself that winning free for the two of you safely is far more important than revenge.

*

You enter the crew quarters with the tank of angry mutant feral grub to find Ampora staring at his palmtop and the adult feral, still trussed, hiding under his bunk. The anchor doesn’t fit, which is the only way you know where he is, besides the threat hissing of course. Ampora still has all his limbs and no more bleeding wounds than the last time you saw him. He’s reading and not complaining, so that’s about 90% more pleasant than can usually be expected.

You rig a net to hold the tank secure to another bunk and leave as soon as you can, grub still screaming. The adult feral hisses at you the entire time. The sooner all three are off your boat, the sooner you can get back to serious sciencerrorist business. The crew, minus Ampora, yourself, and the helmstroll of course, should finish in a few hours and you can return to shore with an economic forecast regarding slimefish populations here and two new state charges for some bureaucratic tyrant to go paper. You suspect that even if you don't get back before dawn everyone is going to find something to do or some place to rest that doesn't involve submitting to the noise in here.

You leave in an annoyed mood and for once Ampora can’t rightfully be blamed, but you won’t let that stop you.

*

As soon as the den cover closes again, your likely ally dips his hand back down into reach of your own temporary den. He wiggles his fingers and you reproach him for his rudeness and stupidity with a gentle bite, above the wound his last such provocation earned. You don’t break the skin this time, you barely pinch it. You don't know him well enough to know if he is slow or if perhaps he meant it as a joke.

You slide back out and he helps you free your legs. You immediately move to free Karkat and soon have your much younger pod mate safely back in your arms. He clings so tightly it hurts but you don’t scruff him, it’s understandable. You check him over as best as you can. He reeks of stress but appears uninjured. He shivers against you and you pet his head and back, vocalize your promise that it's all almost over. Soon. Soon you’ll be back in the water, out of this terrible dryness and the weight that seems to have moved from cradling you to conspiring against your balance.

Before you go back up the den descent and back over the side of their mobile hive, you catch up your strange ally’s arm and lick the wound clean, then those above it, then the other arm. A repeated hand motion suffices to make him lean down and you carefully lick over his swollen eyelid, the orbit above, the two skin breaks through his brow. He lets a small moan escape once and you know it's just a pain noise, a mix of pain and relief in reaction, not an attempt to communicate.

The resistance in him is entirely gone by the time you finish his second arm, and when you finish his eyelid, a scratch across his cheek, he's soft with pain and compliance to your ministrations. You finish with his earfin, straighten the crooked spine and deliberately summon more sealing enzyme to your saliva before you clean off the evidence of his own body trying to heal, the residual coral irritants. There, it should heal fine now.

He might have other wounds, but you would at least apologize for the weakness you inflicted to his wrist, however provoked. No one in the ocean can long afford to be attracting toothfish.

He vocalizes at you and you still don’t know what he’s saying, just as he doesn’t seem to catch any of what you’ve tried to tell him. Such a pity, he’s well-formed and you would have liked to have seen him swimming in a more open space than a reef, the thin length of him cutting through the water efficiently. Of course, gills or no gills, none of the air-breathers ever seem to swim particularly fast according to what your pod has told you. Stunned-skin and half-horn blind, even if they look like you otherwise. They’re clever with tools to compensate, but it’s still sad.

You hit the water with a small splash concealed by the mobile hive’s progress, and swim downward until you should be concealed, make your upward facing surfaces darker, your downward facing ones lighter.

You had hoped to fatten Karkat up before quitting this place of teeming food, but it’s not the first time you’ve moved to adapt. It’s almost time to meet up with your pod anyhow, you’ll just be early. You hope the other eggs have hatched and survived, that no one else has been lost in the meanwhile. You orient yourself to the nearest leyline and swim to meet your pod. Karkat holds tight to the fibers wound around your shoulder and torso, and you can feel the drag of his form, and that of the cutting object your ally gifted you, but you don’t regret either, are smug at how well the instrument of your entrapment now serves you instead.

*

Fudge. You had hoped that knowing that the focus of your stupid inconvenient crush had gone back over the side and into the endless expanse of gross and inconvenient seawater would have likewise damped your crush. No luck. Your arms tingle where he licked them while your muscles still ache and your abraded back is still on fire, the wounds on your arms don’t even hurt. The skin is already almost closed over it and it’s not puffy and hot like your other coral scrapes.

You don’t even regret losing your whittling knife to a figment of your very strong imagination. It was all your imagination. That’s your new avowal, along with tracking down a history feed of some sort to see at what point you missed a whole new color on the spectrum. Who would have known that a bit of hooky here and there would ever exact such revenge?

You can’t even muster up a particular feeling of disgust when you find out hours later that there went your ticket to dry land. You’re stuck on this ship for the foreseeable future, just in time for a long-term assignment to skywhale migration. Ugh. Skywhale bile and mating songs all night long. You add a note in your palmtop to buy earplugs in the next port.

*


End file.
